To understand the cause of these riots, we need to accept that the police
ceded control of the streets to the criminals decades ago.

When rioters rampaged through the suburbs of Paris six years ago, Nicolas Sarkozy, then France’s interior minister, called them racaille. While this can mean “rabble” or “riff-raff”, it also translates as “scum”.

You cannot imagine a British politician using that term to describe the youths who have turned London into a war zone. Yet it is the word that will have been on the lips of all decent people as they watched – appalled, shocked and ashamed – while the capital and, later, other cities were trashed by elements of their criminally inclined underclass. Epithets like “rabble” or “riff-raff” are too mild for the lawless, feckless, mindless and amoral thugs who forced passers-by to strip naked while they stole their clothes; or who torched a furniture warehouse that had withstood the Blitz; or who ransacked shops across London. What else do you call them?

If ever we wanted proof that Britain has been divided into two nations, then here it was. But hasn’t it always been? You did not need to look far beneath the surface at any time over the past 200 years or more to find people ready to loot and rob and steal. After all, the London mob is hardly a new phenomenon. The word itself was coined in the late 17th century as the city’s population grew and aggressive crowds, fuelled by alcohol and perceived grievance, took to the streets with alarming regularity.

Although there were law enforcement officers – salaried watchmen – to patrol the streets, they were too few to make a difference, or influence bad behaviour decisively. So, in order to counter the mob, the Metropolitan Police was established in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, and gradually the disorder subsided. While sporadic crowd violence broke out on occasion, it was not until the late 1950s and the Notting Hill race riots that further widespread trouble occurred. Since then, there have been disturbances linked to protests over the poll tax, policing in Brixton, and, most recently, student fees.

Yet the riots we are seeing now are fundamentally different from those that have gone before. They might, ostensibly, have been triggered by the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a notorious gangster, in north London; but they are fuelled by pure greed, by a belief that something can be had for nothing. The usual brakes on such behaviour – either an appreciation that it is wrong, or by the prospect that the culprit will be caught and punished – are largely absent.

For this, we have to thank four decades of politically correct policing, and a gradual breakdown of the informal network of authority figures that once provided an additional element of control over the bad behaviour of young people. Adults are now reluctant, or too scared, to step in and stop things getting out of hand, or to impose a wider moral code – and in any case, they are no longer listened to. Deference to age and authority has been eroded by years of genuflection to the twin gods of multiculturalism and community cohesion.

The police, bludgeoned by criticism for the way they handled the Brixton riots 30 years ago and the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1994, have become more like social workers than upholders of law and order. And the places that have really suffered as a result are the most deprived: they have to bear the brunt of the criminality and the fear, squalor and alienation that accompanies it.

In recent years, a myth has been allowed to grow up – motivated in part by the approach of the Olympic Games – that London is one of the world’s safest big cities. In terms of its murder rate, that may be true. But no one living in the capital is unaware of the existence of a minority ready to descend into lawlessness at the drop of a hat. There has long been a disconnection between this reality and the self-congratulation of police and politicians inspired by dodgy crime statistics and phoney targets: the truth is the capital has far more crime than 40 years ago, and parts of the city are no-go areas for the police.

Part of the problem is that the breakdown of the family (or an unwillingness to form one) has left a generation of feral adolescents without fathers or any adult males to act as role models. Parents rarely know what their children are doing, and exercise little power or authority over them. Instead, their loyalty is to the gang and to its codes, rather than to the prevailing moral orthodoxies of the majority of the population. Low-level criminality is a way of life – as, for some, are drugs, robbery and routine armed violence.

These young people know that if they are caught committing an offence, they are unlikely to be punished, or certainly not as severely as was once the case. If Britain today jailed the same ratio of people relative to the number of the most serious offences – burglary, robbery and violence – as it did in 1954, there would not be 80,000 behind bars, but 300,000. It may well be true, as penal reformers maintain, that there are some people in jail who ought not to be; but by the same token, there are an awful lot who should be who aren’t.

Another big change is the official attitude to crimes against property: they are no longer considered important. Burglaries have a pitifully low clear-up rate. Under the fixed-penalty notice system for shoplifting introduced by the last government, the police are expected to levy a fine of £80 if the items stolen cost less than £200. There was a time when theft was regarded as a serious crime, and it still carries a maximum jail term of seven years on indictment. Yet thieves are now being treated in the same way as motorists whose cars have remained too long in a parking space. To the exasperation of retailers, the deterrents to shoplifting have virtually disappeared over the years. The industrial-scale looting and recreational rioting that have taken place around London are the ultimate expression of this lax attitude.

To find out what has gone wrong, we do not need to delve too deeply into the specific causes of the appalling events of the past few days, or establish commissions and inquiries. We know what has gone wrong. The police lost control of the streets not in Tottenham, last weekend, but many years ago. Arguably, their failure to intervene robustly on Saturday and to let the looters carry on unmolested for hours owed much to the non-confrontational nostrums that have guided the policing of ethnically diverse areas, with disastrous consequences. On this occasion, they let the impression develop that here was a chance to plunder with impunity. Once that had taken a grip across the capital, and elsewhere, it became far more difficult – if not impossible – for the police to regain control.

There will be a temptation to beat ourselves up as a society for not doing enough to address problems faced by these groups, especially the inadequate education and consequent lack of qualifications that makes it hard for them to get jobs, which largely go to immigrant workers from eastern Europe. That should be resisted. Billions of pounds have been spent trying to improve schools and regenerate run-down areas. The suggestion from some Left-wing politicians, such as Ken Livingstone, that the riots were due to the impact of Government spending cuts is grotesque. If anything, the biggest problem has been the creation of a sense of entitlement sustained by an overly generous (and no longer affordable) welfare system, which expects nothing in return for the benefits dispensed.

Mercifully, some of these issues are being addressed by the Government – though not without sustained opposition from those who helped to created the mess in the first place. David Cameron was commendably tough in his rhetoric yesterday, after cutting short his holiday to return to London. The Prime Minister has promised a robust police response and condign punishment for all those involved in the rioting. This is what all decent people wish to see – but it will mean reversing a culture that is now deeply rooted in our national life.

Mr Cameron’s first duty is to keep order and protect property. That is the contract the people have with the state, which prevents us from taking the law into our own hands. That is what policing by consent means. The dreadful events of the past few days have shown how far that contract has broken down.